Given the recent flurry of activity within the urban cable car sector, we took time to update the world map. For a larger version of map, click on the upper right hand corner of the map below or click here. —
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NOTE: An earlier version of this post originally appeared on December 4th, 2009 (yup, that’s over 7 years ago, kids). At that time, the report “City of Hamilton Higher Order Transit Network Strategy” was available online. Unfortunately, it is no longer available.
Sometimes we don’t know what we don’t know and that’s really nobody’s fault.
For example:
In the spring of 2007 a working paper by IBI Groupcalled City of Hamilton Higher Order Transit Network Strategycame out. For those who don’t know, Hamilton is a city in southern Ontario that is cut in half by a 700 kilometer long limestone cliff that ends at Niagara Falls. It’s called the Niagara Escarpment and has made higher-order transit connections between the Upper and Lower cities difficult.
You See The Difficulty
In the IBI paper the writers conclude that a connection between the Upper and Lower cities is “physically impossible” and that the Niagara Escarpment Commissionmight “strongly resist” any new crossings of the escarpment. As such, Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) became the focus and preferred technology of the report. That’s because streetcars and Light Rail can’t handle inclines of more than about 10 degrees. The only way for a rail based technology to work, IBI concluded, was if a tunnel or viaduct was built.
No where in the report, however, was Cable Propelled Transit (CPT) even mentioned, despite cable’s ability to resolve most if not all of the issues IBI highlighted.
It’s no real surprise. Back in 2007 there was virtually no publicly accessible research available on cable. Believe me, I know; I had just started my research in 2007 and it was incredibly difficult to find anything.
Should IBI have considered cable? Should they have known about cable? I don’t know . . . and furthermore, I don’t think it’s relevant to this discussion. What you don’t know, you don’t know and that’s all there is to it.
What is, however, relevant to our discussion is this:
Photoshop of a gondola traversing the Hamilton Escarpment. Image via Hamilton Spectator.
The City of Hamilton is now updating their Transportation Master Plan and they’re surveying the public on their opinions. And the survey includes a question on gondolas. Last summer, meanwhile, around half of the people that responded at Hamilton’s Transportation Master Plan public meetings said they liked the gondola concept.
So why does that matter?
Because in less than 7 years’ time, a large North American city made a complete about-face on this matter. They went from a place where they thought (incorrectly) that a specific transit problem could not be solved with a fixed link solution due to their topography; to a place where they are actively soliciting the public’s opinion on using a gondola to solve the very problem they previously thought couldn’t be solved.
I know people in the cable car industry think seven years is a lifetime. And it is. But not to a large municipal bureaucracy. To a city, seven years is a heartbeat. In a heartbeat, Hamilton went from basically not even knowing cable cars exist to considering it as a part of their overall Transportation Master Plan.
I recently met someone who disapproves of this whole Urban Gondola concept – which is fine, you’re entitled to your own opinion. He said it’s hard enough to get his grandmother to ride the subway (because she finds it terrifying), let alone a gondola.
According to The Grandmother Test (yeah, it should be called that) we should therefore stop everyone from building subways entirely. Probably not going to happen.
Whether it’s urban gondolas or any other great idea, if you spot someone who fails (passes?) The Grandmother Test, just walk away and don’t waste your time. There’s nothing you can do there.
A couple of years back, Volkswagen came up with a brilliant viral marketing campaign known as The Fun Theory. The basic idea being that “fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better” (their words, not mine).
The shorthand for the theory was the very public transformation of a subway stairwell into a piano as a means to coax people from using the escalator to using the stairs (or piano?). The resulting video became a viral sensation, and has been viewed over 16 million times on youtube.
If you haven’t already seen it, take a look:
The video claims that the piano staircase resulted in 66% more people using the stairs than using the escalator. No doubt and great. Of course, that number has to be taken with a grain of salt. We don’t know how that number was calculated, over what period of time it was measured and if people slowly gravitated back to the escalator after the novelty of the piano wore off.
Nevertheless, there’s something here.
Let’s be frank: Public transit planning and policy are pretty much the antitheses of fun. They’re science without the coffee. And while most of us would agree that increased public transit usage is an incredibly worthwhile and noble goal, there’s been few successes throughout the last 50 years to create a long-lasting trend towards increased ridership within western, developed nations (Europe, possibly, notwithstanding).
Now I’m not suggesting that ridership is dependent solely on a “fun factor,” but I am suggesting that fun is certainly one way to stimulate ridership.
The last 10 years have been a bonanza of learning about the human condition. Fields such as cognitive psychology, behavioral economics and change management have taught us – if nothing else – that humans respond to their environment in irrational, emotional ways.
Change is not a state that occurs out of hard examination of facts and details, it is a state that is achieved when people are emotionally driven to do something that makes them feel better than they did before. That may frustrate numbers-oriented professions and people but it is also an enormous opportunity.
It’s all fine and well for planners and policy-makers to obsess about facts and details – that’s important, don’t get me wrong. But when it comes to implementing the desired change the facts and details point to, the traditional tools used by the planning and policy-making establishment are utterly ineffective.
(Note: For a longer discussion of the fun versus detail argument, please see our single most viewed post Form vs. Function.)
When it comes time to implement, the facts and details need to be thrown out the window because the target audience doesn’t care about them. Consider the typical “pro-transit” arguments:
It saves you money. People don’t care that taking transit saves money. If they cared about saving money, they wouldn’t spend $4.00 for pre-cut carrots and celery at their local grocery store. People will pay for convenience.
It’s safer than driving. People don’t care that taking transit is safer than driving a car. If they cared about safety, no one would ever ski, sky-dive or smoke. Furthermore, you wouldn’t have people irrationally devoted to their car yet completely unwilling to fly (the safest form of mass transit there is).
It reduces traffic. People don’t care that taking transit reduces traffic. Why? Because the benefit of using traffic goes to someone else. If I take transit, I inconvenience myself so that other people may benefit from clearer roads. That’s implicit in the argument and the reason it fails.
That’s where fun comes in. We can change people’s behavior not by advertising to them, educating them or forcing them. We change people’s behavior by stimulating an emotional state that makes them susceptible to change their behavior of their own choice and accord.
Fun is one such tactic for the simple reason that people like fun. You like fun, don’t you?
Problem is there’s no room for fun in our planning and policy-making. These are not realms where fun is allowed to intercede as fun is viewed as unprofessional, naive and strange. Our planning and policy-making fundamentally misunderstands the fact that people are not mere numbers in a model but are wonderfully emotional, fun-loving and irrational. To assume otherwise is to create a model completely out-of-touch with reality.
If there is one thing I wish we could change about our (transit) planning methods it’s that. I want us to start from the simple and uncontroversial assumption that people are irrational, emotional and motivated by things other than time and money. We go from there.
So how does this relate to Urban Gondolas? Simple.
Gondolas are fun.
(Big thanks to Jason for calling my attention to The Fun Theory. Like everyone else, I’d seen the video a couple years back, but I’d never taken the time to apply it.)
It’s hard to blame officials in some cities for treating the fare structure of new public transport line as an afterthought. It’s not sexy stuff. However, for urban cable cars, the failure to put the time and energy to develop a proper fare model may ultimately hinder the project’s success.
Generally speaking, the price elasticity for a transit bus is fairly limited. Image by Oran Viriyincy.
Whether your envisioned CPT line is built for transit, recreation or some combination of the two, the fare must reflect your overall goals. Take the Maokong Gondola, which recently announced its intention to raise fares. Owned by the Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), this recreational gondola transports an incredible 2-3 million riders a year (5 million in its first)!
It’s hard to blame people for thinking these are really great numbers!!
Maokong Gondola. Image by Connie Ma.
And, yes, they are — but the system charges an average roundtrip fare of just US$3.00, among some of the least expensive urban cable cars in the world. Sightseeing cable cars in nearby Hong Kong (Ngong Ping 360) and Korea (Yeosu Cable Car) charge anywhere from US$10-35.
No wonder detractors have lambasted the system for being a perpetual money loser. It bleeds some US$3 million annually. Since fares were scheduled to increase, there were immediate fears that this would cause decreased visitorship and therefore, increase loses. Luckily though, correlation does not mean causation. Let me explain.
During a site visit to the Singapore Cable Car, I learned that they once struggled with a similar situation when management wanted to reorganize priorities. System managers did the math and essentially what happened was this: fares more than doubled in the early 2000s from ~SGD$10 to ~SGD$29 today.
The results were astonishing: ridership decreased considerably — but system profitability actually increased! Why? Simply put, it costs far more to manage millions of low-fare riders than fewer high-fare ones.
They realized their visitors were willing to pay a premium to experience the cable car. Could the same be said of the Maokong Gondola? It’s hard to know without some study but seems to me that a 20-40 minute, 4km US$9.00 cable car ride is still a real bargain. Of course, there will always be that initial challenge to convince the public to pay more for essentially the same service.
Perhaps they should’ve announced the fare raise with a promotion like the Hello Kitty cabins last year, to better justify this cost. Image by travel blogger Jamie (ink+adventure). Click for more photos and original post.
Moreover, this will likely raise issues of social equity as the Maokong Gondola is owned by TRTC. If your city is considering an urban gondola, this is a story you’d likely want to follow. It may well make you think twice about your fare structure.
You’re now the owner of the world’s largest cable gondola transit manufacturer on the planet. This could be a fictional company or a real company; it doesn’t matter.
You’re told by your CEO that three (and only three) innovations must be developed to ensure the technology’s viability into the future. One innovation needs to be relatively simple; the second innovation needs to be difficult but manageable in the near future and; the third innovation needs to be a pipe dream – something that’s likely never to happen within the next decade, but that would nevertheless improve the product drastically.
Your CEO asks you what those three innovations should be.
Here’s mine:
Reduce dwell times to under 30 seconds – should be relatively simple.
Develop gondolas that can operate at the maximum speed of aerial trams – with time it shouldn’t be a problem.
Allow for off-line stations such as those found in faux-prt systems – unlikely to occur anytime soon.
Above: A bumblebee not flying. Image by flickr user cuellar.
There exists an almost century-old anecdote about a German aerodynamicist and a bumblebee.
Over dinner, the aerodynamicist remarked to a biologist that – according to his calculations and the accepted theory of the day – a bumblebee was incapable of flight.
This, of course, wasn’t true. Bumblebees could fly (still do, I believe) and it didn’t matter that the aerodynamicist and his calculations said otherwise. Delighted by the absurdity of the situation, the biologist spread the story far and wide.
Is the story true? Who cares. It’s a good story and that’s all that matters.
Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant because as a fable and piece of folklore it resonates with us as human beings (check out The Straight Dope for their take on the tale).
For better or for worse, it’s a story that feeds people’s willful distrust of experts, specialists and trained professionals.
Most of the time, I think, we should listen to the experts, specialists and trained professionals. The reason they’re experts is because they know more about something than the general population does.
But the same mechanism that makes an expert an expert can also blind him to anecdotal reality. Nine times out of ten the aerodynamicist will be right with his calculations. But because he knows nothing about bumblebees and their biology, his calculations were worthless in the above situation because no matter what his equations foretold, we’ve actually seen bumblebees fly.
It’s in those moments where it’s incumbent upon the non-expert to point out the error – and incumbent upon the expert to admit his shortcomings.
According to the accepted theory of the day you probably can’t use gondolas as public transit. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t doing it.
A good rule to live by for non-experts: Defer to the experts until they’ve demonstrated themselves no longer worthy of the name.
A good rule to live by for experts: You’re ability to remain an expert is dependent upon your willingness to admit what you don’t know and defer to those that do.
